In the realm of human-provided services, corruption often emerges as a major issue to be dealt with, especially in the realm of public services. Systemic deficiencies such as lack of transparency, deficit of information, weak accounting practices and obsolete policies, among other deficiencies, have been known to lend themselves to an environment which breeds different forms of corruption.
Several conventional tools and methods are available for assessing deficiencies that result in corruption, but are found to be lacking in any of several respects. Subjective tools assess corruption through opinion surveys and thus are highly susceptible to a surveyee's personal bias. Reactive tools involve assessments performed subsequent to known acts of corruption and at best serve a corrective, rather than preventative, purpose. Some tools conduct assessments based on institutional diagnostics such as audits and focus mainly on loopholes on an administrative side. Thus, corruption taking place on the side of beneficiaries may well go undetected, rampant as it may be in a particular case. Generally, conventional methods such as those just described are mainly performed manually, with a general lack of reliability thereby implied.